It's a Sunday afternoon in the Fillmore section of San Francisco, and at the Church of St John Coltrane the service is in full swing.

The church's founder, His Eminence Archbishop Franzo King, a tall, stick-thin 60-year-old dressed in a white cassock with a green scarf and a fuchsia pink skullcap, is dancing in front of an 8ft-high Byzantine-style icon that depicts John Coltrane holding a saxophone with flames emerging from it, a gold halo around his head.

The archbishop's son, Rev Franzo King Jr, on tenor saxophone, is playing a version of Lonnie's Lament, from Coltrane's album Crescent, that eventually merges into Spiritual. A choir led by Archbishop King's wife Marina is singing the Lord's Prayer over the music, while a four-piece band (with his daughter Wanika on bass) accompanies them.

Thirty or so congregants are crowded into the tiny room, the air thick with the smell of incense. Some are dancing and clapping and saying Hallelujah! while others are sitting with eyes closed in silent meditation. In a corner, the 11-year-old Franzo King III blows on his own horn.

Every Sunday at noon, the congregation gathers for a three-hour mixture of pentecostal church service and jam session. Sometimes Archbishop King plays. Today, however, Rev King is leading the service, beginning on one knee with his eyes closed, and then standing up and beating his chest with his fist as Coltrane is supposed to have done onstage. The band and choir go from jazz to gospel to funk and back again (apparently they sometimes even dip into reggae). This is what they call a "sound exorcism".

The congregation - a mixture of black and white, locals and tourists - is encouraged to participate, whether by playing an instrument (some bring their own saxophones), singing, clapping or stomping their feet. It's hard not to move - and to not be moved.

The centrepiece of the "Coltrane liturgy" is his 1964 album, A Love Supreme, what the church calls his "testimony". As the band goes into Acknowledgement, the first part of A Love Supreme, the choir sings the words to Psalm 23. When they reach the part where, on the album, Coltrane chants the words "A Love Supreme" over and over like a mantra, Archbishop King walks among the congregation with a microphone. "Let's have some love!" he yells. "Don't just take it! Give!"

For nearly 30 years, the church was based on Divisadero Street but spiralling rents during the dotcom boom forced them out in 2000. Last November, however, they found a new location on Fillmore Street, just down the road from the legendary music venue The Fillmore. From the outside, the storefront church is easy to miss, except for a small sign in the window proclaiming "Coltrane Lives." Inside, with the colourful 8ft-high icons leaning against the white walls, it looks more like a small art gallery than a church. The altar is tucked away in a corner, below a painting of a black Jesus with dreadlocks.

Fillmore - the historically black district known in the 1940s and 1950s as the "Harlem of the west" - is a neighbourhood of quaint Victorian houses now being regenerated. It lies just north-west of Haight-Ashbury, the epicentre of the 1960s counterculture. But much has changed since then: a Gap store now stands at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury among the second-hand clothes and record stores.

After nearly two hours of music, Archbishop King begins his brief sermon, interspersed with a paean to the greatness of St John Coltrane. His bible resting on a conga drum, King explains that "the man was talking to God like Solomon talked to God!") "If you ain't happy, you ain't listening to enough Coltrane!" he says. "Thank God for Adolphe Sax! Let the spirit of God use him!"

With that, the band starts up again, and jams for another half an hour, continuing as the congregation leaves. "There ain't no church like this anywhere in the world!" King yells as he starts dancing again.

About this article

San Francisco's St John Coltrane church

This article appeared on p3 of the Travel section of the Guardian
on Friday 18 August 2006.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 07.51 EDT on Saturday 19 August 2006.
It was last modified at 07.51 EST on Tuesday 21 November 2006.
It was first published at 19.00 EST on Tuesday 21 November 2006.